November 2022:Yehoshua's The Lover, Greene's The Shipwrecked, Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life, and The Oppermanns

 Elliot's Reading - November 2022

The Lover (1977) is and early work by Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua and possibly his first translated into English (?), is a really excellent novel and a great intro to ABY’s interests and style. It’s really quite long - -350- pp. but a font using a minuscule style, thanks a lot Harcourt Brace and it’s told in a series of personal voices - 5 main characters and smattering of minor ones - so we’re going from speaker to speaker and sometimes of scenes covering the same ground, a style that could be annoying in the hands of others but honestly ABY’s great skill at maintaining a narrative and establish a character’s voice and milieu that there’s no problem in following the story line and in watching the characters grow and develop; at times toward the end ABY’s style is (intentionally) a recollection of Faulkner and Joyce - exalted company if you ask me. Yet there’s nothing pretentious about the story - it’s easy to follow and offers a great insight into life in the multi-linguistic, multi-faith populace that feels both ancient and contemporary. In brief the story line: A young man (Gabriel) who had been living with a Haifa family, enters the Army during the 2nd War (I think) and disappears: did he die in combat? Did he desert? The head of the family (Adam, aha!) who runs a highly successful car-repair company, sets out to find out the fate of Gabriel, in a long search that takes him across military lines and across much of the land of Israel - in a plot that also involves his teen daughter and his wife (who’d had an affair with Gabriel - this does not seem to bother Adan in his quest, which is one of the few flaws in the novel) and, most consequently, Na’im, a teenage Arab boy who works in Adam’s garage and plays a pivotal role in the chase for Gabriel. In each of ABY’s novels he seems to don a cloak of expertise in a different field - in this one, auto repair in particular: How does he know, or lean, so much about so many different skills and occupations (in later novels, more tilted toward the arts: classical harpist, film director …)? How does he know so much and wear it so lightly? That’s part of the pleasure of reading ABY: His ease with such a wide range of skills lends credence to every other aspect of his writing. This is not a perfect novel, as several key elements are established but never resolved (most notably a highly troubling affair involving a friend of Adam’s daughter), but it’s a striking, memorable piece - an announcement to the literary world that here’s a new guy with whom to reckon. 

The Shipwrecked is an early Graham Greene novel in which he was working out some new material - good! - but has a # of flaws that have kept it more or less underground. It was first issued in 1935 and was a complete failure; initial title: England Made Me. Reprinted some 20 years later under the banner: The Shipwrecked. Neither title tells us anything we need to know about the work itself, which begins w/ a meeting between a career-woman (Kate) and her woefully incompetent dashing twin brother (Anthony) - Kate lands him a job at her company, which seems a lot like a behemoth investment conglomerate such as Berkshire Hathaway, with the stink, however, of bending the rules to advantage. It turns out, improbably, that Kate is to get married to the head of the conglomerate; things, therefor, look promising for Anthony, but when he witnesses some shifty trading, faming of a second-tier associate, brutal beating of a man who crossed the line Anthony’s had enough and says (improbably) that he intends to moved to the U.S. and marry a trashy showgirl he’d met at the Rivoli gardens. So there’s a lot of plot material here, but in this instance the dough never rises: We don’t know or care enough about Anthony’s fate, nor can we look back sympathetically from our 21st century on Kate’s using sexual favors to advance in the corporation. That said, there are some find passages never the less - notably a great description of an early airline flight and a good meditation on the observations one make when traveling by train. 

Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) was George Eliot’s (Mary Ann Evans’s) first published book of fiction; it consists of 3 sections, each of which is what today we’d consider to be of novella (short fiction)-length or even a novel. We turn to this work with its unenticing title for insight into the writer Eliot was to become. I read just the first section, and will probably come back to the latter 2. The first section - which tells of a rural English minister whose wife takes in to share their domicile an exotic (for rural England) lady, the Countess, which leads to much gossip about the stress this must put upon the husband-wife relationship. Rumors develop end fly - but then tragedy hits the family and the townsfolk feel guilty and admonished for their nasty supposition. There’s a long way to from here to Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch; that said, there are in this short seaman many of Eliot’s insights and apercus - plus some sharp-witted addresses to the reader, all of which will sustain her throughout her career. What this work lacks, however, is a sense of narrative: We get numerous dinner-table conversations and introduction to a lot of characters, but it’s hard to find a driving force in this work - a lot of chatter, but the characters are not faced with crucial life decisions and their consequences; they characters, some of them, may suffer - but not because of their doings and the failures. As Eliot matures as a fiction writer, this will change. 

Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel The Oppermanns (1933) has to rank among the greatest (if lesser known) grand 19th-century novels that conveys a great movement in history as seen through a group lens - usually a # of family members, each affected by the change and upheaval taking place around them, and their dawning awareness - or oblivion to and denial of - the change that is gradually becoming universal: e.g., Buddenbrooks of course, also The Leopard, Lucky Per, maybe A Fine Balance, maybe Lonesome Dove, 100 Years of Solitude, The Makioka Sisters, and let’s not forget Middlemarch. What makes The Oppermanns stand out even more among this august group of novels is that LF was writing even as the events - the Nazi takeover of the government of Germany under the leadership of the man called in this book always The Leader - took place all around him (I think he was in exile in Switzerland when he completed this novel?, not sure haven’t yet read the brief intro to this intelligently edited (helpful rather than pedantic or condescending footnotes, e.g.); the novel has the vividness of journalism and long perspective of literature. In essence we follow the lives of various members of the O family and several friends/neighbors as the Nazi (Nationalist) party flourishes and there’s one attack or indictment of the Jewish community after another, as many of the characters refuse to recognize the changes in their beloved country, unable to give up their prosperity, fantasizing that this too shall pass - it’s only a phase, only a small # of Germans, etc. - as their world collapses into death and exile. Nobody could read this today and not make analogies between the growing, leadership inspired hatred and oppression that we have seen, are seeing, in our own country: We all are Oppermmans! No doubt the novel gets a bit disentangled and frayed on the cuffs at the end: How could LF possibly bring this novel to a conclusion in 1933 as anything but death in obscurity or a false hope; ending aside, though, the O’s is a completely engaging, informing, and sadly familiar nearly a century after its publication. Langth aside (+500 pp) this novel deserves a much wider readership.